Ecdotica Reading: Howard-Hill's "The Dangers of Editing"

In his 1998 “The Dangers of Editing, or, the Death of the Editor,” Trevor Howard-Hill criticizes contemporary editorial theorists for shifting their concern from “the sources of texts to their multiple uses” and thereby placing “an intolerable strain on editors” who “can never foresee…the [many] uses to which editions may be put” (287). He looks to four Shakespeare “uneditors”—Michael Warren, Randall McLeod, Steven Urkowitz, and Grace Ioppolo—who, in Howard-Hill’s estimation, see no need to intervene between the reader and the multiple, often irreconcilably different extant texts of a work. To Howard-Hill, their view might be exemplified by McLeod’s strong claim, “photography has killed editing. Period” (288).

After unsympathetically summarizing each of these theorists’ views (that Warren sees “editors harmfully chang[ing] the punctuation of their copy-texts” (288), that McLeod believes “editing a worthless activity that merely muddies the evidence of the early documents” (289), that Urkowitz promotes “texts formerly judged to be of slight value for modern editors” (290), and that Ioppolo “treat[s] all kinds of revision—authorial, censorial, scribal, theatrical, and transmissional—as equal” in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare was a deliberate reviser (291)), Howard-Hill proceeds to a “general consideration of the[ir] attitudes,” rather than “detailed criticism of their particular arguments” (292). First, he argues, these theorists are hopelessly “antiquarian,” rejecting modern editorial developments (293). Second, they are hypocrites in their rejection of the New Bibliography (which scrutinizes textual witnesses), given that their own views are founded upon this methodology (293-4). Third, the theorists “reject interpretation as part of the editorial function,” “castigat[ing]” editors “for the simple fact that they venture [interpretations]…at all” (294). Howard-Hill concludes that despite the “anxiety about the precariousness of critical editorial judgement” that these theorists demonstrate (297), “The painful truth is that modern readers require mediated texts, just as they require mediated ideas” (296).

Howard-Hill’s vituperation of these authors is reactionary and conservative. Though these authors have certainly warranted some critical discussion and even correction, Howard-Hill does not offer this. Rather, in his breezy, dismissive language (e.g. “Why this may be considered wrong is simple to establish. It is a fundamental law of Newtonian physics that two ideas cannot occupy one head at the same time” (294)), Howard-Hill “reassert[s] the values of the ‘traditional’ editing” (292), squarely in opposition to what he claims he will do. “Modern readers” come off as dumb children, requiring Shakespeare primers that mediate difficulty for them. Is there a market for introductory or even non-specialist editions? Absolutely. Is there also a market for “expert” editions that present the discourse that we call a “work” or a “text,” unmediated, in all of its complexity? I hope so. In the end, though Howard-Hill usefully reminds readers that different editions serve different purposes, he rejects the types of edition that he himself would not author.